To say 2005 has been a busy year for us would be a huge understatement! While 2004 marked the debut of JTA to the World Wide Web, 2005 marked its explosive expansion! To all you readers who have tuned in day after day, you got to see firsthand how we slowly expanded from a small Visual Guide-only site to a full, content-rich Star Wars site. Our main focus will always be first and foremost to provide richly detailed Visual Guides of all your favorite Star Wars toys and collectibles. This is evident in the fact that this year alone, we have brought to you 780 new Visual Guides! Covering everything from the vintage line all the way through to the new Saga Collection line. We have pushed our total to more than 2000 Guides! We fully intend to out-do ourselves in 2006, so stay tuned!

Now, let's take a look back and see what JTA has been involved in in 2005!

Visual Guides
As mentioned above, Visual Guides are our bread and butter. We spend many hours putting together detailed guides so fans can have a place to check out the newly released figures, or put together missing pieces in their collection. Back in March, we started running daily Visual Guide updates, bringing new guides to the site each and every day! We continued that all the way through the end of the year, racking up a total of 780 Guides! The new ROTS line has kept us extremely busy, and that paid off with its completion. Even with the hundreds of Guides we made for ROTS products, we still produced hundreds more for many of the other lines. Back in August, we also started making a hard push to complete another popular line: POTF2. To date, we have added more than 100 new Guides to the POTF2 section.

Not only did we pump out Guide after Guide, but we also opened quite a few new Visual Guide pages. Among these are the Vintage Foreign Visual Guide, Vintage Revenge Cardback Guide, a dedicated Unleashed Guide, the brand new Saga Collection, and a special Young Kids Guide that concentrates on everyone's favorite kids items like Galactic Heroes, Jedi Force, and the new M-Pire and Force Battlers lines. We don't plan on stopping there, in 2006 look for more new Guides, including Master Replicas and Sideshow Collectibles!

Event Coverage
No doubt about it, 2005 hosted some of the biggest events in Star Wars history, this being the year featureing featuring the last theatrical release of a Star Wars movie. It started off with a bang at Toy Fair, continued to boil at Celebration III, and finished up in San Diego with Comic Con. JTA was at each and every event, filling our pages with pictures and news for those who could not attend. Europe even got involved as Pete and Joris attended the annual FACTS convention in Belgium, bringing more Star Wars goodness from across the pond!

The Star Wars Experience
Earlier in the year, we got word that one of our closest affiliates, BeJedi.com, was closing its virtual doors. Fortunately, Joris was not completely ready to throw in the towel and agreed to come join the JTA team! He brought with him a very nice feature he liked to call Star Wars Experience. Covering everything Star Wars, we took this feature and ran with it! While we added new experiences this year, Joris archived experiences of the past. He brought with him FACTS coverage from years past, and a nice little sand sculpture festival that had many Star Wars sculptures front and center. Aside from our key event coverage, we also added some fan events from around country, including yearly socials from the Kentucky and Ohio Star Wars collecting clubs, a Star Wars Disney weekend, and a very cool Star Wars art exhibit from across the globe: The Art of Star Wars Exhibition in Singapore. So, sit back, relax and start enjoying the Star Wars Experience!

Features
As if our plates weren't full enough with all of that, we just couldn't stop there! We added three brand new features to the archives: Collector's Room, Customs Corner, and some very detailed toy reviews. Our collections and customs pages feature your very own collections and customs, for the entire world to see. New staff member Sal offers his very objective and detailed reviews of new figures. I think you will find his reviews very helpful if you just can't decide whether or not to buy that specific toy. So, if you are interested in making some custom figures, need ideas on how to display some of your collectibles, or just want to see what everyone else is into, stop by and check out these sections!

Another small feature we added to each and every page is a tiny thing we like to call Feature Guide. At the top left of every page you visit you will see a small thumbnail highlighting guides from the past. Randomly selected from our archives, this lets you get a glimpse of guides across every line of Star Wars, from vintage to modern. Who knows, you just might come across a guide from a collectible you didn't know existed! So, be sure to click on the feature guide whenever you see one that peaks your curiosity!

Contests & Sponsors
Last but not least, back in July we started a monthly contest giving our viewers a chance to pick up a little something for free. Our contests would not be possible without the support from our sponsors, so I thought the two should go hand in hand. A big thanks goes out to all our sponsors for all of their support. Without them, JTA would not be able to exist. Alliance Collectibles helped keep our ROTS guide flowing nicely and up-to-date. Andrews Toyz started sponsoring our Gentle Giant guide this year, providing us with the latest Gentle Giant items. The Autograph Bounty Hunter provided us with contest prizes each month. So, when you get a chance, be sure to visit our sponsors to see what they have to offer. They are all constantly sending us news with some pretty sweet deals.

The grand finale this year is a partnership contest with Sideshow Collectibles for a free 1/4 Scale Premium Format Luke Skywalker Figure! You can't beat that!

2006 and Beyond
If you thought 2005 sounded busy, we don't plan on letting up! We will continue with our daily Visual Guide updates, bringing you both the new and the old. We will be expanding every section we launched in 2005, and launching a few new sections along the way. Our forums continue to grow every day, so if you want a nice Star Wars community to join, be sure to head over to the Jedi Temple War Room and check out what we have to offer. Toy Fair is just around the corner as well, and JTA plans on being there with full up-to-the-minute coverage! Stay tuned...